


Songs Without Words

by hardboiledbaby



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 13:24:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1900521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hardboiledbaby/pseuds/hardboiledbaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes had, in times past, chided me for unnecessary embellishment and excessive romanticism in my record of his cases. It took me many years to realise the man had been having me on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Songs Without Words

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Watsons_Woes 2014 July Writing Prompts Challenge, prompt #4:
> 
> Words! book-words! what are you?  
> Words no more, for hearken and see,  
> My song is there in the open air—and I must sing,  
> With the banner and pennant a-flapping.
> 
> —Walt Whitman, "Song of the Banner at Daybreak"

Holmes had, in times past, chided me for unnecessary embellishment and romanticism in my record of his cases. _"Confine yourself to the deductions, there's a good fellow,"_ he would say. _"The chain of reasoning, the logic of the thing: that should be your focus."_ Indeed, when he is in a mood to provoke, he has laid the charge of outright sensationalism at my feet and pronounced me guilty without benefit of judge or jury. 

I confess, I am rather dim-witted. It took me many years to realise the man had been having me on.

Which is not to say he does not subscribe to his own pronouncements. That he does so is quite evident from his writings: his monographs on tobacco ash, secret cyphers, and Heaven help us, the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. These and the others he has penned are all factual, rigorous, and accurate to a fault.

The fault being, of course, that they are drier than the Afghan desert.

I grant that these treatises are intended for an audience altogether different from the subscribers of _The Strand_ , and I do not dispute their scholarly value to those who would make a scientific analysis of criminals and their crimes. Nonetheless, I venture to say, with a fair degree of certainty, that there are many more of my readers than there are of his. But I digress. 

His words are pragmatic where mine are romantic, it is true. But his music....

I do not speak here of his tuneless scraping of bow across fiddle, nor his mathematically precise chord progressions. No, I speak about the music he plays for _me_.

He favours Paganini's sonatas, Sarasate's _Gypsy Airs_. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn. Romantics, each and every one.

My friend may claim to have no use for the softer emotions, but the fact remains: he is a man who loves art for its own sake. 

He also loves me. I cannot account for it, but it is true. I am as sure of that as I am of my love for him.

He plays romantic songs without words, and I write romantic words without music. What a pair we make.

"John."

I look up to see Holmes standing in the doorway of our study, his beloved Stradivarius in hand.

" _Lieder_ tonight, I think," he says.

I chuckle at that, and though he gives me a quizzical look, he does not ask. He could deduce the reason for my amusement, if he wished. But he does not. He simply smiles at me. It is enough for him that I am happy, I think.

And I am. Oh, what a pair we make.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Lieder ohne Worte_ ( _Songs Without Words_ ); Felix Mendelssohn, composer


End file.
